“I don't get/this mind-body thing,” said the funny man. “The
brain's/in the body, last time I looked.” Whether
they are re-interpreting family
legend, grappling with personal myth or imagining a day in the life of
Clara Schumann or Gertrude Stein, the poems in My Body Tells
Its Own Story
explore the boundaries between mind and body.

“The common thread through the eclectic poems in this stunning
collectionremains the body, its hungers and
desires, aversions and obsessions,
joyous epiphanies and agonizing deprivations. About the presumed
mind/body dichotomy, Mary Zeppa writes: ‘The brain leaves its
Gordian/knot on the pillow.
The body/laughs all the way home.’ Zeppa locates her poetry at the
intersection of the intellect and the flesh, a nexus she explores with
the precision of
a surgeon and the passion of a lover.”--Carol Frith, Co-Editor, Ekphrasis—A
Poetry Journal

“The poems in My Body Tells Its Own Story test
the boundaries between mind and body, flesh and spirit; they explore
how family stories can be
encoded in our bodies. ‘I leave the echoes,’ Zeppa says, ‘that crowd
around / my bones: sonatas, waltzes, lowdown / blues and small tunes
with no names.’
And so she does, in poem after poem of this marvelous collection, so
full of lyric intensity, so full of passion for all the little details
of a life in
which the terrifying and the ravishingly beautiful inextricably
intertwine.”--Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of The Fortunate
Islands

“Mary Zeppastitches together the lost world,
rustling just beyond like a shadow, and the sensuous world at our
fingertips. These poems render a
crafted yet passionate sensibility, which burns with its own rhythm and
pace but never consumes itself. With unflinching eye and ear, Zeppa
transforms the
beautiful and the violent, the joyful and the grief-stricken. She moves
forward and remembers, divines love and speaks with the dead, reaches
for a
fleeting kiss and proffers the grace of song.”--William O’Daly, poet,
translator, and editor

Mary Zeppa’s poems have appeared in a variety of print and online
journals, includingPerihelion, Switched-on Gutenberg, Zone 3,
New York Quarterly, and Permafrost, and
in several anthologies, most recentlyBeyond Forgetting:
Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State
University Press, 2009). Zeppa is the author of two chapbooks,Little
Ship of Blessing (Poets Corner Press) and The
Battered Bride Overture (Rattlesnake Press). Zeppa, a
found-ing editor of the Tule Review, is also a
literary journalist; her interview ”Charles Wright on Eugenio Montale
and Dino Campana” (PoetNews,
1985)
appears in the 2008 McFarland collection Charles Wright in
Conversation. She served as executive editor of Keepers
of the Flame: The First Thirty Years of the Sacramento Poetry Center (Rattlesnake
Press, 2009) and currently cohosts the Center’s Third
Thursdays at the Central Library series. Zeppa is a three-time Resident
Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a 20-year
veteran of the a
cappella quintet Cherry Fizz.